Rise of contact center AI software for digital enterprises

With the advancement of many disruptive technologies, user-centric operations have become a significant priority for future-thinking contact centers. None have been more significant than Artificial Intelligence. In recent years, the emerging role of AI has been paving the way for contact centers to work on a daily basis. From customer service and data management to workforce optimization and revenue growth, contact center AI software has made operations seamless, faster, more precise.

The industry recognizes this game-changing trend too. According to Gartner, the 'Agent AI' product segment will be valued at $1,2 trillion by 2030. With every passing year, more and more digital enterprises are getting on-board. IDC Market Research reports that over 50% of user interface interactions will use AI-enabled computer vision, speech, natural language processing, and Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality.

How Google made the cloud contact center smarter

During mid-2018, Google had released Contact Center AI, with limited machine learning expertise. It was known to be a flexible solution that catered to many needs of the contact center. Late last year, Google Cloud Contact Center AI was generally available for use. The new AI-powered cloud service came with an inbuilt conversational engine called Dialogflow that could automate customer interactions.

Dialogflow was designed with the sole purpose of empowering developers to build engaging interfaces. Boasting of over 600,000 developers, it has become a feature-rich yet low code tool of choice for creating natural cross-platform experiences. Some of Dialogflow's key features include:

  • Speech integration through which audio input can be triggered to detect caller intent request
  • Analytics dashboard that displays usage data and NLU data to offer insights on agent performance
  • Support for creating multiple versions of Agent and publishing them to separate environments

Some of Dialogflow's more recent beta updates are:

  • Phone Gateway to assign phone numbers to virtual agents
  • Knowledge Connectors to interpret unstructured documents and automate responses
  • Automatic Spelling Correction to avoid typos and grammar inconsistencies
  • Sentiment Analysis to score a user's attitude as positive, negative, or neutral.

Digital transformation through AI-driven workflows

With Google Contact Center AI growing strength in combining conversational workflows with a voice strategy, it has empowered contact centers to offer personalized and proactive customer experiences while ensuring their operations are lean and scalable. Its two primary offerings are:

Virtual Agent: It provides instant access to personalized self-service options by automating fundamental interactions. Virtual Agent also leverages real-time transcription to ensure a smooth transition from virtual to human agents to address complicated issues. It reduces the time and effort spent by agents on completing mundane tasks and helps them focus on issues that require problem-solving skills.

Agent Assist: Continuous support for live agents through real-time transcribing of calls and caller intent identification. Agent Assist also enables contact centers to offer step-by-step assistance in real-time with regards to basic workflows. It gives deep insights about what is on the customer's mind before equipping them to deliver clear-cut and precise responses.

Key differentiators of Google Contact Center AI software

  • Virtually no agent downtime

Agents don't have to monitor and service every request consistently. By providing 24/7 customer support, it frees up agents to add strategic value to customer experience.

  • Agents get the help they deserve

Real-time assistance for live agents, along with sentiment analysis and chat keyword scanning. It's easier to be proactive and personalized while dealing with customers.

  • Reduced handle times

Conversational self-service ensures that the customers no longer have to redirected or made to wait for handling simple requests. It helps reduce customer frustration and improves agent performance.

  • Quick and accurate data insights

Powerful deep-dive analytics about agents and customers offer a 360-degree view of the overall operations. Strategizing for expansion or innovation is easier than ever before.

  • Powered by partners

With nearly 100 innovators joining the Google Cloud Partner Advantage, there are plenty of options for integrating AI with existing technology to address niche problems.

  • Increased brand loyalty

Seamless routing to the best agent guarantees that the customers get the best possible experience, thus extending the duration of their engagement with your brand.

How to select a Google Contact Center AI Partner

Selecting the right Google Contact Center AI partner is about asking all the right questions. Here are six of them you ought to seriously consider:

  1. How long have they been offering AI solutions as part of contact center services?
  2. Can they enable swift and painless migration and change management roadmaps?
  3. Can they help the workforce to be more productive, without complex training requirements?
  4. Does their bot technology come with contextual and industry-focused workflows?
  5. Can they help measure the effectiveness of escalations from AI to live agents?
  6. What KPIs do they use to analyze the performance of AI tools?

8x8's new integration with Google Cloud Contact Center AI

8x8's Contact Center capabilities, along with Google Cloud Contact Center AI software, puts our customers in the best position to streamline their back-end operational workflows while delivering great front-end customer experiences.

8x8 X Series' new integration with Google Contact Center AI software makes it tremendously easy to unleash the power of AI, without having to invest in homegrown programs.

What we can do:

A combination of 8x8's existing AI technology and Google's Contact Center AI gives you the ability to route simple questions to a virtual agent. Using Virtual Agents makes more time for your live agents to handle more complex problems while reducing caller wait times and costs.

We help you leverage AI to help your agents perform better, even when the call is too complex to be handled by a virtual agent. Through Agent Assist, you can reduce the time your agents spend in looking for information while giving them immediate context on the customer's request.

Additionally, 8x8 can also provide detailed speech analytics, voice-to-text transcription, and keyword/keyphrase searches of contextual call topics and customer comments. Integrating Google's AI expertise with our communications expertise gives you an even better product that matches the customer's need for communications at the speed of your business.

If you'd like more information on how we can make you future-proof using Google Cloud Contact Center AI, call us at 1-855-467-6309 or fill out an online form below to request a no-obligation quote from an 8x8 product specialist.